When the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, in the late 1700s, there was lots of money to be made by investing in factories and mills, by opening up new markets, and by gaining control of sources of raw materials. The folks who had the most money to invest, however, were not so much in Britain but more in Holland. Holland was the leading Western power in the 1600s, and its bankers were the leading capitalists. In pursuit of profit, Dutch capital flowed to the British stock market, and thus the Dutch funded the rise of Britain, who subsequently eclipsed Holland both economically and geopolitically.

In this way British industrialism came to be dominated by wealthy investors, and capitalism became the dominant economic system. This led to a major social transformation. Britain had been essentially an aristocratic society, dominated by landholding families. As capitalism became dominant economically, capitalists became dominant politically. Tax structures and import-export policies were gradually changed to favor investors over landowners.

It was no longer economically viable to simply maintain an estate in the countryside: one needed to develop it, turn it to more productive use. Victorian dramas are filled with stories of aristocratic families who fall on hard times, and are forced to sell off their properties. For dramatic purposes, this decline is typically attributed to a failure in some character, a weak eldest son perhaps. But in fact the decline of aristocracy was part of a larger social transformation brought on by the rise of capitalism.

The business of the capitalist is the management of capital, and this management is generally handled through the mediation of banks and brokerage houses. It should not be surprising that investment bankers came to occupy the top of the hierarchy of capitalist wealth and power. And in fact, there are a handful of banking families, including the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, who have come to dominate economic and political affairs in the Western world.

Unlike aristocrats, capitalists are not tied to a place, or to the maintenance of a place. Capital is disloyal and mobile – it flows to where the most growth can be found, as it flowed from Holland to Britain, then from Britain to the USA, and most recently from everywhere to China. Just as a copper mine might be exploited and then abandoned, so under capitalism a whole nation can be exploited and then abandoned, as we see in the rusting industrial areas of America and Britain.

This detachment from place leads to a different kind of geopolitics under capitalism, as compared to aristocracy. A king goes to war when he sees an advantage to his nation in doing so. Historians can ‘explain’ the wars of pre-capitalist days, in terms of the aggrandizement of monarchs and nations.
A capitalist stirs up a war in order to make profits, and in fact our elite banking families have financed both sides of most military conflicts since at least World War 1. Hence historians have a hard time ‘explaining’ World War 1 in terms of national motivations and objectives.
In pre-capitalist days warfare was like chess, each side trying to win. Under capitalism warfare is more like a casino, where the players battle it out as long as they can get credit for more chips, and the real winner always turns out to be the house – the bankers who finance the war and decide who will be the last man standing. Not only are wars the most profitable of all capitalist ventures, but by choosing the winners, and managing the reconstruction, the elite banking families are able, over time, to tune the geopolitical configuration to suit their own interests.
Nations and populations are but pawns in their games. Millions die in wars, infrastructures are destroyed, and while the world mourns, the bankers are counting their winnings and making plans for their postwar reconstruction investments.

From their position of power, as the financiers of governments, the banking elite have over time perfected their methods of control. Staying always behind the scenes, they pull the strings controlling the media, the political parties, the intelligence agencies, the stock markets, and the offices of government. And perhaps their greatest lever of power is their control over currencies. By means of their central-bank scam, they engineer boom and bust cycles, and they print money from nothing and then loan it at interest to governments. The power of the banking elites is both absolute and subtle…

“Some of the biggest men in the United

States are afraid of something. They

know there is a power somewhere, so

organised, so subtle, so watchful, so

interlocked, so complete, so pervasive

that they had better not speak above

their breath when they speak in

condemnation of it.”

— President Woodrow Wilson

The end of growth – capitalists vs. capitalism

It was always inevitable, on a finite planet, that there would be a limit to economic growth. Industrialization has enabled us to rush headlong toward that limit over the past two centuries. Production has become ever more efficient, markets have become ever more global, and finally we have reached the point where the paradigm of perpetual growth can no longer be maintained.

Indeed, that point was actually reached by about 1970. Since then capital has not so much sought growth through increased production, but rather by extracting greater returns from relatively flat production levels. Hence globalization, which moved production to low-waged areas, providing greater profit margins. Hence privatization, which transfers revenue streams to investors that formerly went to national treasuries. Hence derivative and currency markets, which create the electronic illusion of economic growth, without actually producing anything in the real world.

If one studies the collapse of civilizations, one learns that failure-to-adapt is fatal. Continuing on the path of pursuing growth would be such a failure to adapt. And if one reads the financial pages these days, one finds that it is full of doomsayers. We read that the Eurozone is doomed, and Greece is just the first casualty. We read that stimulus packages are not working, unemployment is increasing, the dollar is in deep trouble, growth continues to stagnate, business real estate will be the next bubble to burst, etc. It is easy to get the impression that capitalism is failing to adapt, and that our societies are in danger of collapsing into chaos.

Such an impression would be partly right and partly wrong. In order to understand the real situation we need to make a clear distinction between the capitalist elite and capitalism itself. Capitalism is an economic system driven by growth; the capitalist elite are the folks who have managed to gain control of the Western world while capitalism has operated over the past two centuries. The capitalist system is past its sell-by date, the banking elite are well aware of that fact – and they are adapting.

Capitalism is a vehicle that helped bring the bankers to absolute power, but they have no more loyalty to that system than they have to place, or to anything or anyone else. As mentioned earlier, they think on a global scale, with nations and populations as pawns. They define what money is and they issue it, just like the banker in a game of Monopoly. They can also make up a new game with a new kind of money. They have long outgrown any need to rely on any particular economic system in order to maintain their power. Capitalism was handy in an era of rapid growth. For an era of non-growth, a different game is being prepared.

Thus, capitalism has not been allowed to die a natural death. First it was put on a life-support system, as mentioned above, with globalization, privatization, derivative markets, etc. Then it was injected with a euthanasia death-drug, in the form of toxic derivatives. And when the planned collapse occurred, rather than industrial capitalism being bailed out, the elite bankers were bailed out. It’s not that the banks were too big to fail, rather the bankers were too politically powerful to fail. They made governments an offer they couldn’t refuse.

The outcome of the trillion-dollar bailouts was easily predictable, although you wouldn’t know that from reading the financial pages. National budgets were already stretched, and they certainly did not have reserves available to service the bailouts. Thus the bailouts amounted to nothing more than the taking on of immense new debts by governments. In order to fulfill the bailout commitments, the money would need to be borrowed from the same financial institutions that were being bailed out.

With the bailouts, Western governments delivered their nations in hock to the bankers. The governments are now in perpetual debt bondage to the bankers. Rather than the banks going into receivership, governments are now in receivership. Obama’s cabinet and advisors are nearly all from Wall Street; they are in the White House so they can keep close watch over their new acquisition, the once sovereign USA. Perhaps they will soon be presiding over its liquidation.

The bankers are now in control of national budgets. They say what can be funded and what can’t. When it comes to financing their wars and weapons production, no limits are set. When it comes to public services, then we are told deficits must be held in check. The situation was expressed very well by Brian Cowan, Ireland’s government chief. In the very same week that Ireland pledged 200 billion Euro to bailout the banks, he was being asked why he was cutting a few million Euro off of critical service budgets. He replied, “I’m sorry, but the funds just aren’t there”. Of course they’re not there! The treasury was given away. The cupboard is bare.

As we might expect, the highest priority for budgets is servicing the debt to the banks. Just as most of the third world is in debt slavery to the IMF, so the whole West is now in debt slavery to its own central banks. Greece is the harbinger of what is to happen everywhere.

The carbon economy – controlling consumption

In a non-growth economy, the mechanisms of production will become relatively static. Instead of corporations competing to innovate, we’ll have production bureaucracies. They’ll be semi-state, semi-private bureaucracies, concerned about budgets and quotas rather than growth, somewhat along the lines of the Soviet model. Such an environment is not driven by a need for growth capital, and it does not enable a profitable game of Monopoly.

We can already see steps being taken to shift the corporate model towards the bureaucratic model, through increased government intervention in economic affairs. With the Wall Street bailouts, the forced restructuring of General Motors, the call for centralized micromanagement of banking and industry, and the mandating of health insurance coverage, the government is saying that the market is to superseded by government directives. Not that we should bemoan the demise of exploitive capitalism, but before celebrating we need to understand what it is being replaced with.

In an era of capitalism and growth, the focus of the game has been on the production side of the economy. The game was aimed at controlling the means of growth: access to capital. The growth-engine of capitalism created the demand for capital; the bankers controlled the supply. Taxes were mostly based on income, again related to the production side of the economy.Read more of this post

On January 23, 2010 – Russian online daily Pravda claimed that Russian Northern Fleet indicates that the earthquake that devastated Haiti was clearly the result of US Navy weapon test meant for Islamic Iran. Venezuelan president Hugo Chevez has blamed Obama’s Zionist administration for using the disaster to occupy Haiti. Washington has dispatched 11,000 US soldiers to the country while blocking the humanitarian aid reaching the country. It’s feared that 200,000 people including 21 Canadian have died as the result of the eartquake.

Avraham Zuroff writing in Israeli daily Arutz Sheva had reported that Israel’s Ministry of National Infrastructure’s Geographic Institute will carry-out a test in the southern Negev Desert in order to stimulate an earthquake on behalf of US Defence Department. according to the daily: “Israel will create a controlled explosion of 80 tons of explosive material which will stimulate the intensity of a tremor after an earthquake on magnitude 3. Natural earthquakes of similar intensity occur in the Middle East region about once a week without the public feeling them”.

Israel which has sent a team of doctors to Haition – is using it a PR campaign against the Arabs and Muslims. Islamophobe Alan Dershowitz, a senior member of Israel Hasbara (propaganda) Committee wrote in Zionist think tank, Huffington Post: “While Israel dig deeply into its treasury (which has sucked US$3,000 billion from US taxpayers since 1970s) and manpower to send medical assistance a quarter of the way around the world, Arab and Muslim nations are generally missing in action when it comes to relief efforts”. However, the IRIN Global (the UN Office for the coordination of Humanitarian Affiars) smacks the face of Zionist Jew liar. On January 17, 2010 – IRIN reported that aid to Haiti is pouring from UAE, Jordan, Islamic Iran, Qatar, Kuwait, Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon and Islamic Relief (UK). Furthermore, American investigating journalist, Stephen Lendman, has claimed that 220 Israeli doctors and soldiers on the humanitarian mission in Haiti are involved in human organ stealing and harvesting body parts. Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive in his interview with CNN’s Zionist poodle, Christiane Amanpour has confirmed this: “There is organ tafficking for children and other persons also because they need all types of organs”. Last year Sweden’s newspaper Aftonbladet had reported that “Israeli troops stole and then sold the organs of Palestinians who died in custody in early 1990s”.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez believe that the US tested HAARP ( a US military program) to create the Haitian earthquake. The publicity stunt to cover-up the real cause of the earthquake is modeled on Israel Hasbara Committe propaganda lies. Professor Michel Chossudovsky wrote on January 21, 2010: “The Haiti relief disaster scenario had been envisaged at the headquarters of US southern command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami one day prior to the earthquake. In the past, mant analyst believed that Indonesian Tsunami was also a result of a similar test by Russia.

The Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean is a daughter of Haiti. Haiti-born Canadian radio host, Jafrikayiti (Jean Saint-Vil), has apealed Michaelle Jean to demand that French president Nicolas Sarkozy (son of Jewish mother) must return US$40 billion to Haiti government – which French government had ransomed at gun point from the Republic of Haiti from 1825 and 1947.

“A Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy. Likewise, the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of an animal,” – Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzberg. ~(Rehmat’s World)

Did the mining of Haiti’s riches since 2004 GW Bush regime change cause the earthquake? Listen to Ezili Dantò on mining Haiti’s riches and concern for environmental degradation by the foreign companies. (Read the transcript with reference links.)

“The idea that human activity can cause seismic activity is widely accepted in the scientific community …the connection between oil production and earthquakes dates back to at least the 1920s, when geologists in South Texas noted faulting near the Goose Creek oil field…A 1967 human-triggered earthquake in western India linked to the Koyna Dam registered a 7.0 earthquake.”

open salon | Since the earthquake, I’ve had occasion to ponder, like many others, about what may have caused this heretofore-unknown natural disaster in Haiti? Was it a natural occurrence or man-made? Port-au-Prince, Haiti has not had an earthquake in 239 years. Why now? The nation of Haiti is only 206 years old, so Haitians in Port-au-Prince have no experience with earthquakes whatsoever. Did not know that for an earthquake you run away from the house. So, when the trembling started they did the worst possible thing – ran into their houses as they are used to, for protection, with hurricanes. The houses all collapsed on them.

The devastation is heartwrenching. 200,000 dead in the capital alone, devastation in the South also, in Leogane, Les Cayes, Jacmel. In Port Au Prince everything collapse, 400,000 to be relocated, millions homeless, untold numbers with amputated limbs, hundreds of thousands right now dying without access to water, food, shelter and medical treatment.

Since the 2004 Bush regime change, Ezili’s HLLN has been concerned about the digging up of Haiti without any regards to environmental degradation.

In an April 29, 2009 interview with Chris Scott of CKUT (90.3 FM) in Montreal, entitled Haiti’s Riches: Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti, I expressed concerned that under the UN occupation which made the Haitian goverment a puppet government, Haitian lives and welfare were not priorities just corporate exploitation of Haiti’s resources and cheap labor. Haiti’s emergency civil preparedness agency was destroyed during the Bush regime change and never rebuilt. We’ve had severe hurricanes in 2004, 2005 and then the four back-to-back hurricanes of 2008. The people’s living conditions has not improved in the 6-years the U.S., France and Canada have controlled Haiti through the U.N. proxy occupation. In fact, with clorox hunger, food riots, no monie to send children to school, high food and fuel prices, no development, things, had gotten much worse since the coup against President Aristide. The people were simply slowly dying as UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton waxed on about the “good business climate” in Haiti prior to the earthquake. They died and there was no rebuilding of the institutions the Bush coup d’etat had helped destroy. But there were 9,000 UN troops in Haiti doing what?

In the Mining Haiti’s Riches interview, I recount how there were areas in Haiti hidden behind UN guns, fenced off where Haitians knew nothing about what these soldiers were doing.

Then the earthquake hit. What remains is unimaginable. The rescue and recovery process was and is inhumane. The relief from pain and hunger is still not in place. And, as I think about the process of rebuilding, I started checking whether digging for gold, iridium, copper, uranium, coal, marble, diamonds, oil and gas could trigger an earthquake. And the answer I found sent chills up my spine. Made me sick to my stomach. Can this really be?

From what I’ve read, drilling deep into the earth, digging and mining may trigger earthquakes.

And, drilling either for fossil fuels or renewable energy exploration may cause earthquakes. Both geophysicists and oilmen agree that natural-gas drilling trigger earthquakes. One oilman stated that “there is not the slightest doubt” that gas production caused the temblors.”

A New York Times report confirmed drilling for oil sets off earthquakes and detailed how a drilling project near San Francisco and a similar project in Basel, Switzerland were shut down over concerns they triggered damaging earthquakes. Both diggings involved fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep.

…large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor. (Geothermal energy and Quake Threat Leads Swiss to Close Geothermal Project.)

Haitians have been under occupation by the US through the proxy UN mission since the 2004 Bush regime change/coup d’etat.

Before the earthquake, Rene Preval, the president of Haiti answered to Washington not the people of Haiti. I’ve written extensively about this and that information is readily available. The mining in Haiti and the digging up of Haiti was going on without any oversight.

Since the earthquake hit, it’s been clear that the power-brokers who control the US military, the free marketeers, are exploiting this Haiti earthquake shock, when the Haitian people are hurt, in pain, disorientated and horrifically more defenseless than usual, to impose their privatization and further entrench their corporate domination in Haiti. (Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again.)

Scientists Ginette and Daniel Mathurin say that Haiti is filled with hydrocarbons and that they have identified 20 oil sites in Haiti. Five of them are considered of great importance by specialists and politicians. There’s oil in Haiti’s Central Plateau, including the region of Thomonde, the plain of the cul-de-sac and the bay of Port-au-Prince, they say. In fact, Daniel Mathurin says that “the oil reserves of Haiti are more important than those of Venezuela. An olympic pool compared to a glass of water that is the comparison to illustrate the importance of Haitian oil compared with those of Venezuela,” he explains…The specialists contend that the government of Jean Claude Duvalier had verified the existence of a major oil field in the Bay of Port-au-Prince shortly before his downfall.

And if, as the oilman said, there’s not the “slightest doubt natural-gas drilling causes earthquakes” and there was drilling in addition to the mining of gold, copper, coal, uranium and iridium, stealthy going on behind the UN guns, then the question becomes, which of the coup detat countries – US, France, Canada – using the UN proxy occupation to drill for oil, gas and to dig for gold, iridium, marble, granite, et al, helped cause the earthquake?”

Murray Dobbin | Watching the response of the Canadian government to the catastrophe in Haiti I am sure I am not the only person to see this as a powerful counterpoint to our grotesque participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. How do Canadians feel, for example, when they hear of an RCMP officer killed as a peacekeeper versus a soldier killed in Afghanistan? Sadness for both, of course – both were doing jobs they were told to do. But the death of the soldier in Afghanistan is much more complicated. For me, the death is doubly tragic because that soldier is there illegally, the killing he is engaged in (both civilians and the Taliban) is done for no purpose the government can explain, and the mission itself is almost universally recognized as ill-conceived and doomed to fail – no matter how its goals are defined. Nothing good will come from all those lives lost, mangled or ruined by serious injury.

While the RCMP’s role in Haiti can never be seen to be completely pure and altruistic, given Canada’s shameful role in ousting Haiti’s president, by most accounts Haiti had become less violent. And the Haitian people generally welcomed the development, such as it was, and the peace. At least our mission there, tainted as it was, allows for honourable deaths of soldiers and police if and when such occur.

In Afghanistan, ultimately, no such honour is possible. We send our soldiers, most of them young, to a place that does not want them, where they know that progress is either temporary or non-existent, where they are propping up a terminally corrupt Afghan government and are complicit in the geo-political objectives of the US in securing oil and gas supplies. A death here is tragic because it is we, as Canadians, who are sending soldiers to die for nothing. Worse, to die for an ignoble cause.Read more of this post

Al-Manar | The United States is now operating at four airports to ferry aid and relief supplies to quake-devastated Haiti, a senior US military commander said Thursday.

In addition to the Caribbean nation’s main port of entry, Port-au-Prince airport, US forces were also now at work at airports in the coastal city of Jacmel.

They were also operating in the neighboring Dominican Republic at San Isidro and Barahona, US Southern Command chief General Douglas Fraser said.

Around 11,000 US military personnel are currently controlling the operations both on the ground and offshore aboard US Navy and Coast Guard vessels, and another 4,000 US troops are expected to arrive in the coming days.

The Americans’ controlling of the aid operations has raised tensions with some countries. Bolivia and Venezuela have criticized its heavy presence and France earlier expressed annoyance after aid planes were delayed from landing.

French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet called on the United Nations to clarify the US role in Haiti, saying the priority was “helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) has complained that five of its planes carrying a total of 85 tons of medical and relief supplies have been diverted from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic since January 14, although one of its planes was allowed to land this week.

On Thursday, the Haitian president said that “Haiti is not under guardianship” of other countries as they help nurse and feed the victims of last week’s huge quake.

Also, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told RTL radio in Port-au-Prince: “The Americans are here at our request, they are here purely to help us with our humanitarian and security needs.”

However, many commentators see in that US is not welcomed in Haiti. They confirm that US seeks to re-occupy Haiti. The U.S. occupied Haiti until 1934.

American troops returned in 1994, and now, the US Marines are back in Haiti for the same mission but under a different title: to support Haiti relief.

Phyllis Bennis said in Huffington post that “the reality is, on the ground, U.S. military forces take charge, as the United Nations is pushed aside.”Read more of this post

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez continued to blast the United States role in Haiti alleging it of taking advantage of last week’s earthquake to occupy the island nation.

The socialist leader made the statement in Caracas while inaugurating a new cable car system in the capital city after making similar comments as recently as Monday.

“Cuba has more doctors in Haiti than the United States. You see the Marines with machine guns and rifles and actually firing them. They are firing at the looters. I don’t know how many they’ve killed at this point, but they go in there with a license to kill whoever they want, wherever they want and however they want. It is terrible of the empire.”

The US military is spearheading the huge ongoing international relief effort in the devastated Caribbean country and has around 12,000 personnel on the ground or on ships offshore

IF ever there was a land that is cursed, it is poor Haiti. In addition to dire poverty, devastating annual storms, a wide variety of diseases, general misery, and hunger, it has now suffered the biggest earthquake in 250 years. Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, tens of thousands are dead and over a million homeless. There is little food, clean water or power in the capital region. Haiti’s ten million people have no effective government. Police and sanitation workers have disappeared. The few hospitals that survived the quake are swamped by dead and injured.

The National Palace, where a Haitian friend and I were once crazy enough to crash a dinner party given by the dreaded dictator, Francois Duvalier, aka ‘Papa Doc,’ has collapsed. ‘Papa Doc’ caught us – but laughed at our escapade instead of having his dreaded secret police, the ‘Ton-Ton Macoutes,’ shoot us. Duvalier, who died in 1971, ruled Haiti through a unique combination of terror and voodoo sorcery. In fact, he was high priest of Haiti’s voodoo (properly ‘Hongan’) religion. Our old hangout, the charming gingerbread Olofsson Hotel, the scene of Graham Green’s book, ‘The Comedians,’ is heavily damaged. Its fabled bar used to be the capital’s watering hole and hotbed of intrigue.

Port–au-Prince always looked half ruined. Today, the damage is complete. Haiti is an island destroyed by human folly and crime as well as natural disasters. France acquired Haiti in 1697. After the native Arawak people were wiped out, France imported a million black slaves from West Africa to work the island’s sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations. Haiti’s slaves suffered frightful brutality. The greatest bourgeois fortunes of Bordeaux were built on slavery, not wine.

Haiti’s amazingly rich soil produced four crops a year. In 1780, the total value of Haiti’s exports to Europe exceeded those of Spain’s silver and gold-producing Latin American colonies, or the entire British West Indies. Today, Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, racked by diseases, including syphilis, leprosy, HIV, TB, typhoid, and blindness caused by lack of vitamin A.

In the late 1700’s, Haiti’s slaves revolted, led by a brilliant black general, Toussaint Louverture. After fierce fighting, he was tricked by the French and died in prison. Toussaint’s lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, finally defeated Napoleon’s troops and liberated Haiti in 1804. But the rival leaders of the liberation soon fell out. Christophe, driven mad by syphilis, finally shot himself in the head with a silver bullet in a massive, but useless fortress he had built atop a mountain above Cap Haitien. For the next century, Haiti was ruled by a feuding mulatto minority and petty dictators. Washington sent the US Marine Corps to occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Though sometimes brutal, the US occupation is regarded by some Haitians as their ‘golden age.’ The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder.

This column despises imperialism. But the US could do enormous good for Haiti. Its desperate people have failed to govern themselves and have no other hope. Most Haitians, I think, would welcome long-term US humanitarian intervention. This writer, a former soldier, longs to see the US military saving rather than taking lives.

The US will waste over $1 trillion this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can certainly afford a few hundred million dollars to rescue Haiti.

France also has a special responsibility to Haiti.

The Gulf States could provide desperately needed financial aid to long-suffering Haiti.(Eric Margolis)

With a gaggle of small children, Louis Saurel’s family huddles under a plastic tarp near the wall that borders St Pierre plaza in the Haitian capital. As with most public places in the city, the small park has been converted into an improvised camp for thousands of people taking refuge from the destruction of their neighbourhoods by Tuesday’s quake.

After almost one week, they feel abandoned to their fate. “We have lost everything. I have no money, nothing,” he said. “We can’t return home because the houses are destroyed, and the ones that haven’t collapsed are crumbling. We are facing chaos.” Next to him sat Jeanty Edrice, who until Tuesday was a neighbour in the Rue Panamericaine, and whose house is completely destroyed.

“We have nothing left, only the family. We have no choice but to live in the park for the time being,” she sighed. Both were aware that their precarious situation could be a prolonged one. There is growing concern that food and water are becoming scarce, most commerce has shut down, and the little bit of money they have is running out.

On top of that, the stream of new refugees continues unabated. Their numbers have spilled out of the park and onto the sidewalks. There were only two portable toilets in the entire zone, clearly insufficient for the growing population. The stench is omnipresent, and the unsanitary conditions carry a heightened risk of epidemic.

On a nearby street, two thin hoses provide the only running water in the area, and adult men and women line up to bathe as best they can, naked and together. There is no room for modesty under these conditions. “Nobody has come to see us, not the local authorities nor the international agencies,” said Jean Robert Casimir, who has been living on the streets with his family of 12 since Wednesday, all in a tent designed for two people.

Casimir keeps a small radio glued to his ear, anxiously awaiting any news that might alleviate the situation in the chaotic camp. He said the overwhelming sense of desperation was worrisome, because it could soon break out into violence. “If it continues like this, it will become violent. Soon, we will lose faith, very soon, and that will be the end for us,” he said.

Sourel also said that the refugees were reaching the limits of their patience, and that violence could erupt “very soon. Not within months, but days,” he warned. All hope rests on the arrival of promised international aid, which until now is but an illusion for the refugees in the park. For Casimir, the situation seems suspiciously familiar.

“We haven’t much hope, we’ve been through this before,” he said. “After (last year’s) cyclones, we waited and waited, and they told us that the aid was coming, that it was on its way, and we never saw any of it. With this earthquake, we fear the same thing will happen.”(BRecorder)

Haitian President Rene Preval has said estimates of the death toll in the devastating earthquake in capital Port-au-Prince could easily be in the tens of thousands, while other officials said more than 100,000 may have perished.

“Up to now I’ve heard 50,000, I’ve heard 30,000. Let’s say, it’s too early to give a number,” Preval told broadcaster CNN, conceding that any sort of official estimate was extremely difficult. “I am still trying to understand myself the magnitude of the event.”

The Caribbean nation of nine million is the poorest country in the Americas with an annual per-capita income of $560. It ranks 146th out of 177 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index More than half the population lives on less than $1 a day and 78 per cent on less than $2. There is a high infant mortality rate and the prevalence of HIV among those between ages 15 and 49 is 2.2 per cent Haiti's infrastructure is close to total collapse and severe deforestation has left only two per cent of forest cover About 9,000 UN police and troops are stationed in the country to maintain order

Earlier, he had told The Miami Herald that thousands may have been killed in the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that rocked the country on Tuesday afternoon, and issued an appeal for world assistance. The damage was centred in and around the capital Port-au-Prince, home to about 1.9 million people.

Figures for the number of dead remain murky as the government tries to assess the damage.

Speaking on CNN, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said he believed “well over 100,000” died, based on the number of buildings that have collapsed. The Haitian ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph, estimated 100,000 people dead or missing.

The Haitian ambassador to the Organization of American States Wednesday said he refused to accept estimates by other Haitian officials that 100,000 people may have died in the Haitian earthquake.

“I want to be optimistic,” Duly Brutus said at a Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) briefing about the Haitian crisis. “I refuse to accept that we have more than 30,000 dead.

Addressing the emerging photos of long lines of dead bodies in the streets of Haiti, PAHO deputy director Jon Andrus pleaded that there not be a rush to bury the dead too quickly before they are identified and families can be contacted.